


Bird of Prey

by AnonEMouse



Series: When your heart is broken all you can do is break, too [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Assassins don't make good friends, Character Death, Gen, Rape/Non-con References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-12
Updated: 2012-05-12
Packaged: 2017-11-05 05:02:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/402710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEMouse/pseuds/AnonEMouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's been called a lot of names, but the one that stuck was Hawk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bird of Prey

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that there are allusions to rape in this story, so use your own discretion as that relates to triggers.

He is the Hawk.  
  
They call him a lot of names throughout SHIELD, he knows this. _The Hawk_ and _Hawkeye_ are the nicest, even have kind of a romantic ring to them. (He grew up in the circus. His soul is not without romance.) _Sniper_ and _assassin_ are accurate, _killer_ gets to the point. _Soldier of fortune_ works, too. _Fury’s pet_ is annoying, _Coulson’s problem_ makes him mad. (He is never a problem for Coulson, not for Coulson, not ever.) _Kill switch_ is meant to be funny but the dumb fucks who call him that don’t know about the files in his head, the ones marked for his eyes only, the ones that he must destroy after memorizing. Files that use words like _failure_ and _exigent circumstances_ and _containment protocol_ and _lethal force_.  
  
//  
  
The op in Belgrade failed due to exigent circumstances, containment protocol AT-107 was initiated by Agent Barton, lethal force necessary. Agents Taggart, Stroude, Cole, Hallowell, Macomb and Price KIA. Target remains at large. Agent Barton recorded six kills.  
  
//  
  
He’s never been in the military or had any formal training. He learned his skills in the circus, both the shooting and the killing, and he has always and will always work for whoever pays him best. (All he really needs is a target but if he killed without accepting payment they would put him in a cage.) Once, over twenty years ago, he thought morals had a place in his world but then he started killing for money and he learned that morals are a dream that normal people indulge. He has a talent and he uses it. Where is the bad in that? (Moral decisions are for his masters, and his masters are ultimately benevolent. That is the world’s fortune.) His pay at SHIELD is exorbitant, his bonuses are marked on congressional oversight forms as _necessary asset expenditures_. He spends his money on improving his weapons. The rest is left to rot in a bank. What does a hawk need with money?  
  
//  
  
Fury’s asset was late for the rendezvous. They found him in an alley two blocks from the designated drop point. He was dead, both his jugular and carotid artery severed by the arrow protruding from his neck. Fury turned to the junior agent with him, a former Ranger named Coulson, and said, “Find me who did this and get him on our side. Whatever it takes.”  
  
//  
  
Natasha says, _I’ve got red in my ledger_. She keeps count, a running tally, and no matter how much shit life rains down on her, she keeps hoping she can one day balance her books. He doesn’t count. He has no ledger. The killing doesn’t weigh on him. It is, after all, what he’s good at. It’s his most marketable skill. It’s his job to kill, to end lives when the voice in his ear whispers, _Take the shot_. He is very, very good at his job. There’s no shame in that. (He’s good at fucking, too, but was unwilling to be paid for that, a refusal which ended with him beaten and left for dead at seventeen.) The fortune teller read his cards once and said his would be a life of blood and death. At thirteen, two years into his life with the circus, the old crone told him, _You are Death_ , so he had a few years to get used to the idea. (No one here knows about the circus. They think he fled the mob.) That’s why he chose killing over fucking when it came time to get a job. Killing is nothing but a task, an objective, and fucking is something he does for fun. Everyone needs a hobby.  
  
//  
  
He found most of the people who were in the tent that night. He didn’t find them all because he was never sure how many there were, but the faces he remembered, he found. He was good with a gun but found poetry in a bow so he practiced the two most efficient kill shots for an arrow. The women he took through the throat, severing the vocal chords that called him _baby_ and _honey_ and praised him for his _big cock inside me_. The men he got in the eye socket, preferably left-side because he was a lefty and that’s as much of a calling-card as he would leave, besides the arrows. For these men, though, he added a bit of flair from his showman’s repertoire: a throwing knife through the hands that held him down and prized him open.  
  
“Barton,” said the Swordsman, pleading beneath him. “You don’t have to do this. We can work something out.”  
  
His smile was no smile at all and he bore the arrow down, pressing through skin and feeling bone crack and then he got up and left the Swordsman with an arrow sticking out of his chest, like something from a cowboys and Indians movie. He put another arrow through the Swordsman’s left eye, so they would know who it was.  
  
It was the only time he worked for free.  
  
//  
  
Dr. Selvig thinks he’s an idiot, he knows that. _The Hawk_ , the other man says, and it’s derisive and dismissive all at once. Selvig is hardly alone in his opinion. Most people think he’s nothing but a machine, just a robot to activate when someone needs killing. Coulson collects Captain America memorabilia, Hill dates bankers and accountants and tells them she’s a museum curator, Natasha dances ballet, but the Hawk has no hobbies, no discernible life outside SHIELD. Therefore, he must be nothing more than the thug they think him. (He speaks nine languages fluently and five more conversationally. He reads voraciously and writes in journals that he keeps in a safety deposit box. He seduces professors and discusses Hegel and Schopenhauer in between bouts in bed.) He sits in the scaffolding he’s claimed as his nest and watches, cool eyes tracing every movement. He’s supposed to be the head of security, he should be down on the ground going over status reports and yet more background checks but the other agents make him as uncomfortable as he makes them. (Belgrade went tits up and he had to take out six of them. It’s best if they’re not friends.) And he doesn’t trust that cube. He doesn’t like how Selvig looks at it, how he calls it _she_. He doesn’t want to look away from it, because he knows that doors open from both sides.  
  
//  
  
“What do you mean, _no_ ,” the Swordsman hissed, holding Barton’s wrists so tightly he could feel the bones grinding together. There were people in the other room, men and women who had come for a special show.  
  
“I don’t want to do that,” he said, trying to throw the older man off him. He was seventeen and scared and Barney wasn’t there to save him this time.  
  
“You’re uneducated carny trash, but you have a big cock and a pretty mouth." His breath was hot on Barton’s face. “Tell me, what else are you good for?”  
  
Barton didn’t know what to say because really, what else _was_ he good for? Trick shooting wouldn’t get them off the carny circuit.  
  
“That’s what I thought.” The Swordsman laughed and it was cruel.  
  
And then there was pain, too much pain, burning through him from the inside out and it wouldn’t stop, would never stop, and he thought that maybe he was dead and this was hell. But then it was over, and Barton knew he was still alive, and he thought of the old crone and _you are Death_.  
  
He knew something else he was good for.  
  
//  
  
 _You have heart_ , Loki says, and touches him with that spear thing and he is burning again, raped again. The last clear thought he has before he is unmade is, _No I don’t_.  
  
He knows what he is doing. He’s not sure about anyone else, what this is like for the others, but he knows he is with Loki of Asgard, who is his master now. (Loki is not a benevolent master. That is the world’s misfortune.) He knows they’re building a portal with the cube and that it will bring an alien race to Earth, and that Loki intends to conquer and be king. He knows when he lets fly his arrows and takes out guards at a museum in Germany, and he knows when he triggers a bomb that explodes the number three engine on the Helicarrier. He just doesn’t care. He has his objective and he will achieve it. (The cube talks to him in a quiet voice. _You are Death_ , it says. He says back, _So are you_.) He knows it is Natasha behind him and he knows that he doesn’t want to kill her. That isn’t part of the objective. So he holds back and she takes him down.  
  
When he is himself again, Natasha won’t tell him how many agents were killed by his hand. She thinks he asks out of guilt but that’s not it. He kills and it doesn’t burden him. What he wants to know is his score with Loki, what precisely was taken from him, besides his mind. (He saw Hill on the bridge but he hasn’t seen Coulson and there’s something in Natasha’s eyes when she says, _I’ve been compromised_ that makes him uneasy.) Loki made him burn. And he always repays those who make him burn.  
  
//  
  
Barney left in the middle of the night when he was asleep. They’d been drifting apart over the last three years as he got more and more involved with the performers and Barney was still stuck with the roustabouts. He didn’t blame Barney for leaving. Barney was twenty, too old to babysit his little brother. Besides, he was sixteen and could take care of himself. And there were dozens of people around, all the time, if he needed help.  
  
“Clint,” a voice called from outside. Ariel, the trapeze artist. If he caught her in the air and didn’t drop her, would she let him touch her in other ways, too? “We’re supposed to be practicing.”  
  
He smiled and walked out to join her. This place could be shady and there were dangerous animals and dangerous acts, but it was Barton’s home. What was the worst thing that could happen here?  
  
//  
  
He’s an Avenger now, and they still cut a wide berth around him throughout SHIELD. (Fury thought of this as a promotion, an end to the wet work and the files that must be destroyed but it is really his way out. It is his death.) Some fear Loki might still be in there, looking out through the Hawk’s eyes, but a few, the sharpest and most experienced agents, who saw him cripple the Helicarrier in under five minutes, recognize that the Hawk working for them is the same as the Hawk that worked against them. Hill watches him very closely, wondering what his mind was really like when he was compromised. The Captain keeps an eye on him, too, because he recognizes the Hawk for what he is right away. (He is Death.) But he can’t figure out why Hawkeye takes his orders, what’s in it for him as an Avenger. It’s not the money, or the fame, and though killing doesn’t bother him, he doesn’t take pleasure in it either, unless it’s Loki in his crosshairs. (He accepts that he can’t kill Loki but he blows the crazy fucker up repeatedly, knowing he is causing pain.) He isn’t trying to atone for the lives he’s taken, like Natasha, so what is keeping the Hawk on their side?  
  
He follows the Captain’s orders because after Coulson, the Captain is the best person he has ever known. Truly good people are rare, rarer than anyone knows, and he has served masters both good and bad and he prefers the good ones. (He was cornered at a truck stop and Coulson said, _Come work for me and I’ll give you a nest, not a cage_.) It doesn’t change anything about the killing because he does that regardless, but he prefers the nest to the cage. Like Coulson before him, the Captain is someone he would die to protect. He will die to protect him, one day, but until then he is the Hawk, circling his prey, waiting for the Captain to whisper in his ear.  
  
//  
  
He was eleven when he was pushed down the stairs at the state home, his bones burning as they broke. Later, finally released from the infirmary, he threw a pencil at the boy who pushed him. It struck him in the eye and stayed there. Barney grabbed his hand and they ran.  
  
They ended up at the circus across town, hiding until a man with a purple hood found them. The man looked down at two blonde heads and two pairs of blue eyes. The older eyes were blue and open like water, the younger eyes were steely and remote like a hawk’s. The man in the purple hood vouched for them and they stayed in his camper as the circus moved town to town.  
  
“We’re in the circus now, Clint,” Barney said, his eyes shining with adventure. “One day, you’ll be the star attraction, the world’s greatest marksman they’ll call you, and I’ll be the ringmaster!”  
  
//  
  
The roof under his feet is starting to collapse. On the next roof over, Barney is wearing Trick Shot’s purple hood and he is doing something to the Captain, something that is hurting him. Barney is yelling but he can’t hear the words over the sounds of the other Avengers battling Barney’s accomplices on the streets below.  
  
The roof is caving in and he’s out of time. He can jump, or he can shoot. He plants his feet and draws an arrow, lining up his shot.  
  
He does not feel the weight of all the lives he’s taken, he doesn’t think of Loki or the Helicarrier, there is no last-minute accounting or any ledger to be balanced. (He does think of Coulson, and maybe there is a debt owed after all.) He is just doing what he does best, what he considers his job. The Captain is down and Barney will kill him, and that is not acceptable. _You are Death_ echoes in his memory as he lets his arrow fly.  
  
 _No_ , he thinks as he falls. _I am the Hawk_.


End file.
